Patrick White

In The Fires Of Life - Poem by Patrick White

In the fires of life stand up for the heresy of your humanity as if there were no one else to burn for it, but you. When you’re enveloped in the flames of an estranged loveletterthat embraced you like a flower that bloomed in fire a long time ago, o how many afterlives has it been since the hive had a dark queen to attend upon, whether they honour your urn or spread your ashes on an icy walkway for more pedestrian traffic, don’t hitch your dragons to the death cart of a false dawn, but ride the wind exhilarated as Icarus in your own updraftlike the errant flightpath of a firefly with a mind of its ownknowing there’s more insight in the sun that shines at midnightthan there is in the shadowless noon of a shallow enlightenment.

Listen to your heart as if it were real, not solid and soon enough you’ll be able to hear with your eyes what your ears can’t see that far beyond the aerial perspective of the dark where parallel lines meet to focus on burning another black hole in the sky with the congruence of the intensity in the iris of your third eye.

Fire doesn’t burn fire, so you can shine lyrically like the earthin the presence of your own star without being consumed.How do I know this? I can taste the words life puts in my mouth like a prophet in a fireproof furnace steeling the iron in my blood like the growing edge of a sword tempered in my tears that kills me back into lightyears of life every time I fall upon it to save the face of some unknown tomorrow from debasing the integrity of its sorrows by not hammering out the slag of lesser stones than we draw the best Damascene swords from

as we do the sabres of the moon to the rhythm of a pulse on the anvils of our percussive hearts forging fire-breathing dragonsshedding the darkest nights of our eyeless ores, like a bunting of skin, a ribbon and windsock for the stars that keep circling the north pole like the exoteric tree ringsof the lost art deep in our heartwood of calling down the lightninglike the roots of a seed embedded in our starmud, waking upafter a long sleep, like a pine-cone in the firestormof a germinating desire to live as immensely as possible.

While there’s time to grow the preludes and epilogues of the next threshold we’re about to cross like refugeesover a bridge that spans the omnidirectional extremes of our mindstreams getting on with their going like waterclocks and aqueducts, or nightcreeks whispering their lyrical way like the ode of a dark roadout of a grove of sacred aspens into a clearing brighter than the light of the stars that pilot the orbs of the dung beetlesor shepherd dragons to graze on fire in higher pastures than the world mountain could imagine in its wildest dreams.

Swept up in the fires of life, in this delirium of inconceivable probabilities sleepwalking among the stars, clarity isn’t so much a matter of burning your old tattoos off like constellations that leave scars or cauterizing sunspots like dangerous moles before they eclipse your immaculate wholeness with the veils of isotopic ghost fleets raising sail in the bays of the north, as it is in losing yourself in the picture-music of the lightshows the mind puts on like an artist who isn’t looking for an alibi to justify his eyes to what he sees without corrective lenseslike a starmap of fireflies without a fixed place in time and space.

In the fires of life you must be perfectly combustible like the rainbow bodies of the wise men of Tibet, your eyesinflammable as two lumps of coal in the skull of a snow man, dead branches for arms, and your heart so generousnothing left of it can be found like an ice cream conethat’s fallen to the ground from the hands of a child for the ants, and melted away into diverse forms of life that ensure it doesn’t go to waste. We will all break bread in time with the worms that shall nibble the crumbs of our dreams from the corners of our eyes. Maggots overpunctuating our mouths with too many commas and semi-colons, necrophagoi editing our hearts and brains like turkey vultures amending us like roadkill as if we were merely the first draftof a poem ablaze and scattered with life as rapturous frogs in the rain.